“Is Ignorance Bliss?”

by Elizabeth Breau, Ph.D

This question is a common persuasive essay prompt because it requires students to consider the implications of uncomfortable knowledge. Are you better off not knowing you are going to die in three weeks? What if you didn’t know you were adopted?

Usually, my students argue that knowledge is better than ignorance because it allows you to plan, work towards solutions, and avoid future errors. You can’t solve a problem if you don’t know it exists. However, in much of the United States today, knowledge is under attack, and educators are under pressure to stop teaching the truth. Concerns about students being brainwashed by liberal ideology have motivated many of these efforts, and some adults have claimed that white students might be uncomfortable during classroom discussions of America’s historic treatment of non-white people. Is sparing some students discomfort a legitimate reason to erase the experiences of others?

When I taught women’s studies at Vanderbilt in the mid-1990s, I had trouble persuading my students that topics like domestic violence and rape were worthy of serious discussion. The first time I taught the class, a group of students responded to a reading assignment about domestic violence by arguing that more women beat up men than the other way around. They refused to hear that domestic violence is a common phenomenon in our culture, and I did not know how to address their refusal.

The second time I taught the class, the topic of sexual harassment caused a similar uproar. This time, however, I didn’t try to persuade those who questioned the veracity of the reading. Instead, I called on a female student who had raised her hand. She said, “I know that sexual harassment happens because it happened to me.” She related her story, which involved a male high school debate competition judge and a comment about her legs. When someone asked what happened, she said, “I reported it, and he got fired.” Not only were all the skeptics silenced, but another girl also raised her hand to share an experience in which she and a female friend were bullied by two big guys into giving up their front row seats at a Vanderbilt basketball game.

My class was outraged by this story of bullying. All aspects of the situation were analyzed: the girls’ inability to speak up for themselves or ask a security guard for help, what they could have done or said instead of giving up, and why they hadn’t felt entitled to defend what was theirs. In fact, the class kept returning to the topic in subsequent classes, and several of them wrote insightful essays about how the stories of their classmates had affected them. Their initial denial of the uglier aspects of male/female relationships could not withstand the lived experiences of their classmates.

Now, flip that story around so that it’s told from a non-white person’s perspective. I once had a Hispanic student who shared how he felt when people avoided sitting next to him on the bus. The class determined that his ski cap was the culprit because the combination of brown skin, a hoodie, and a ski cap made him look scary. A few weeks later, I boarded an overcrowded NJ Transit train and resigned myself to standing for the hour-long ride home. As I looked down the length of the car past the dozens of standing passengers, I saw that there was one open seat that no one else would take--next to a dark-skinned man in a ski cap.

I went and sat down.

After that, I realized that I didn’t need to persuade my students of “the truth.” Instead, I only needed to provide them with the tools to determine that truth for themselves, tools that can work just as well in a conversation about the harmful effects of racism. For example, students who think that “white privilege” is an invention of “wokeness” might reexamine their views if they heard about how it separates their lives from those of non-white people. I know I will always remember my white classmate from Texas who said that black people in her town were expected to step off the sidewalk to allow white people to pass: for the first time, she realized that never being forced to stand in the mud for someone else’s convenience was a form of white privilege in her hometown.

Elizabeth Breau, Ph.D., is a private English tutor and the author of History According to SAT: A Content Guide to SAT Reading and Writing. Her website is historyaccordingtosat.com. She can be reached at elizabeth.breau@gmail.com.

by Dr Cathy Coker

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